Movie Review: ‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Josh Andrés Rivera, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman, Viola Davis

Plot: In light of falling support for the 10th Annual Hunger Games, a group of training games-masters are tasked with mentoring the tributes and generating public interest in them. 18 year old Coriolanus Snow is assigned District 12 singer Lucy Gray Baird, and feelings begin to develop between them.

Review: If you’re not in the loop, and you skipped the plot summary, this is a prequel to The Hunger Games movie and book series. About ten years ago, The Hunger Games was the driving force behind the Young Adult Dystopia boom that lead to many attempted franchises. The movies were massive hits and elevated Jennifer Lawrence to super-stardom. At the centre of it was the concept of the Hunger Games themselves, forcing the youth of the poor districts to kill each other to entertain the ruling class. The logistics and the media circus surrounding this was always the highpoint of the stories. Everyone enjoys coming up with what their skillset would be and what strategy they would use to survive.

Spoilers, if you’re worried about it.

This prequel story gives us the Hunger Games from a different point of view. Rather than following one of the contestants, we’re watching things play out from the point of view of a mentor, a member of the wealthy elite who has to turn their tribute into a fan favourite. If this is your first foray into the Hunger Games lore and all these terms are confusing, then tough shit. This prequel assumes you’re up to date with the franchise that came out ten years ago. This does, of course, mean that the intended audience for this teen drama were not old enough to watch the originals when they came out. We can’t up but feel that this movie is about 5 years to late, ideally during the tumblr era.

Awkwardly named Coriolanus Snow (Blyth) appeared in the original series, played by Donald Sutherland and as the evil president final boss. This time around he’s a young man attending a prestigious school. He spent a rough childhood surviving during the war that lead to the Hunger Games being created, and his once powerful family have fallen on hard times. They’re maintaining a public image of wealth, but are relying on Coriolanus to win an academic prize and scholarship to keep a roof over their heads. Coriolanus gets the rugged pulled out from under him when the reward is taken away and instead the graduates must mentor those chosen for the Hunger Games to win the prize.

Now with his motivation, Coriolanus has to turn his assigned tribute into a star. Lucy Gray (Zegler) is a nomadic musician from the 12th District, and already garnered attention for a stunt pulled during her selection. Her colourful clothing and singing helps Coriolanus get the attention of the public, but eventually she has to enter the arena and fight for her life.

Amid all the Hunger Gaming, Coriolanus is also dealing with a drug addled Dean who co-created the Hunger Games, a nasty figure who controls his fate (Dinklage), a deranged geneticist who controls the games (Davis) and a schoolfriend who pushes against the government (Rivera). Whilst Coriolanus and Lucy Gray have a budding and potentially tragic romance, there’s much politic intrigue and rebellion to muddy the waters. What Coriolanus’ motivation is from scene to scene tends to be pretty fluid. At times he seems intent on sowing discord, pursuing his own goals and protecting his loved ones, while at other times he appears bound by the rules and is willing to play along if it advances his position in society. This makes it a bit difficult to comprehend why he acts the way he does at key points in the story, especially during the third act. The stakes need to be better defined here…we know he’s going to live through all this, so we need to know if he’s an idealist who becomes corrupted, or if he’s on board from the start and everything was a means to an end.

One things that really stands out and separates this from the Katniss era is the design elements. I’ve always thought that Panem was some scary future of our world, and I can’t imagine the point in the future where we go back to CRT TV sets and add a retro filter to what are clearly digital cameras. Logic aside, this is an aspect of the movie we liked. The atomic-punk fashion and technologies are good fun, best yet for the series, and it’s best encapsulated by Jason Schwartzman as the gaudy host of the Hunger Games (and amateur magician). It makes no sense, but we’re on board with the visual style.

The whole idea of the Hunger Games being scaled down from a manipulated, trap-ridden jungle arena to a circular cement ring. It ties is back to the colosseum days of the Roman Empire, and they do stretch it out in some clever ways. The drone scenes are absolutely chaotic, something that Schwartzman has to lampshade. High points, simply for the unexplained madness of the drones. Overall it’s a much more brutal experience, largely stripped of the glamor that surrounds the Games decades later, making it all the more grim that these children are in this nightmare scenario.

We liked the design work and we liked the Hunger Games based act – it is what we come for – but then we come to the massive anchor this movie is dragging behind. There’s been no part in the franchise to date where we’ve gotten to the end of the death-match and wanted to keep watching for the better part of the hour. The story is split into three clearly denoted acts, with the Hunger Games itself occurring within the 2nd act, leaving us with a big chunk of the movie involving Snow getting a new job in security in District 12 so he can track down Lucy Gray and have a whirlwind romance where they play in the lake. Obviously this idyllic set-up has to end in tragedy for Snow to turn into a literal blood-spitting villain played by Donald Sutherland.

We were already fidgeting and checking watches when we got to the end, and it’s left kinda vague. With the scope of the story we needed something a bit more intense to set Snow on his path, what it feels like is a misunderstanding and Snow shooting his gun in the air. As much as we liked some parts of this movie, it fizzled out at the end.

Rating: FOUR out of TEN